Erik Niedling

Erik Niedling: Formation

by Erik Niedling

Publisher's Description

A rediscovered collection of glass negatives containing photographs of plants from the period between the two world wars is the starting point for the current photo series Formation by Erik Niedling (*1973 in Erfurt). For months, he studied the plates, reproduced them, and then made new, large-format prints from the negatives he selected. Tradition is repeated, yet through his subtle arrangement, the reconstruction is transformed into deconstruction. A reversible picture is created, leading the viewer to ask the unanswerable question of whether the work is now a positive or a negative, a document or a work of art, historical material or a new artistic creation.

According to Bernd Stiegler, “Erik Niedling succeeds in creating something that is simultaneously wonderful and extremely disconcerting. He expunges the aesthetic, epistemological platform from New Objectivity photography, but at the same time, he leaves it in its own sort of twilight—the ghostly, beautiful, dimly glowing light of photography. And in this light, our own cultural history once again begins to radiate.”